Travel Time Reliability of Highway Network under Multiple Failure Modes

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This is interesting and timely work. Some comments:

1. Abstract: the relationship between network reliability and travel time reliability should be briefly mentioned.
2. Introduction, second paragraph: it is not clear why the travel time reliability was studied in this project, please highlight the importance of this parameter instead of only defining it. 
3. Line 39: TTR is not defined before, please revise it. Please check the abbreviations throughout this manuscript.
4. Lines 42 to 75: the authors only listed the previous studies, please add a brief conclusion on it and summarize the advantages and drawbacks.
5. What is the innovation of this paper? Please highlight it by the end of the introduction.
6. The analysis is reliable.
7. Conclusion: what is the main impact factor of TTR?

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The article proposes a new method for travel time reliability of road network. This new method is based on changes on some important coefficients and different conditions of blockage and/or congestion.

 

I have some concerns with respect to the structure and clarity of the article. First off all, the introduction, except for the first paragraph, is not providing a context, background, problems to solve and /or solutions provided by the new method. The section is written as a related work section only enumerating related proposals without really highlight problems and disadvantages, and even without relating them to the propose here. The last paragraph of section 1 is confused because it is difficult to know if authors are taking about something proposed by them or something done by other authors. May be a full explanation about what the new method is improving with respect to disadvantages provided by other works , could be useful in this case. Also, a paragraph about the structure of the article must be added.

 

Following, is section 2 also a related work section? Is a background section? Which is the reference for the node degree equation?

 

I think that a related work section must be separated from the introduction section, adding also advantages and disadvantages of each related work with respect to the propose here. Improvements in the new method must be fully described. This is important because when the reader arrives to line 134 “With consideration of the limitations of the above methods” it is not clear which limitations are mentioned.

 

Section 3.1 is also confused. Authors are using the past tense to refer to something that is showed later in the text. This happens in several parts of the article. Why is there a different line spacing in section 3?

 

What is the Ucinet software?, it is not referenced.

 

In general, the article is very hard to read. What is the relation between section 4 and 5? and section 3? These sections were not introduced so the reader must guess what they are trying to show.

 

Please review lines 222-225.

 

Again, section 6 must contain a better introduction about what authors are trying to show. Why do authors propose to change that coefficients/variables and no others? What did happen with the related works? That is, why have these variations been proposed? Which improvements have been proposed with respect to the related works? For example. Conclusion 1 is not described in the article..”by comparison with the other methods”,... which ones? Also, some of the rest of the conclusions are not fully described, or authors do not indicate the way they arrived to them.

 

I think that the article could be interesting. However, there is an important lack of fundamentals about what authors are trying to show and why. A better organization with clear objectives and/or hypotheses must be added.

 

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

This manuscript investigates the reliability issues, such as connection reliability, travel time reliability, and road network reliability of high way network under various scenarios. The authors propose a new calculation method of calculation of travel time reliability and the change rule of travel time reliability of road network under different travel time coefficients and delay coefficients. The scenarios of different conditions of blockage or congestion is also considered to derive the reliability of road networks. This paper provides the analysis and simulation results, but it exposes minor contribution due to lack of solid analysis and out-of-date topic. Other comments are as follows.

1. The contributions of this study are not clearly addressed.
2. Most of simulation results are not explained.
3. The recent related works are not cited in the paper.
4. The notations used in the paper are suggested to reduce to increase the readability of the article.
5. Some acronyms are not defined. e.g., TTR (line 39), BPR (line 129), RC1 and RC2 (Fig. 3), etc.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 4 Report

1. There are redundant dot at the end of the abstract.
2. The content of the article contains a description that should be removed:

"One blank line should be left between the main text and the Figure (or Table caption) and one blank line should also be left between the Figure and the Figure caption, as well as between the Table caption and the Table. Please leave also one blank line between the Figure caption and the main text, and between the Table and the main text".

3. I propose to standardize the way of placing the description of the vertical axis on charts and placing them as for example in Figure 11.

4. The article covers the element of verification of the developed model in real conditions - eg basis on of archival data.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 5 Report

The paper thought interesting, does not present an adequate structure. The lack of a clear methods and discussion chapter make it impossible to objectively understand the goals and outputs of the research.

The paper should be adapted to a classical research structure. The objective of the paper and the relevance of this research are not clear presented. The methodology needs to be expanded. Methodology and discussion sections must be explained and revised.  The article should be supplemented with research methods.  This article does not create new solutions or research methods but reader can see the enormity of work put into field research.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Thanks to the authors' hard work, since all my comments are addressed, no further review process is needed.

Author Response

Thanks a lot.

Reviewer 2 Report

This is my second round review for this article.

 

I think that some of my suggestions have not been well-addressed at all:

 

1. Fig 1 is not described, so it is difficult to see which section correspond to each rectangle in the figure.

 

2. Again related work section is part of the introduction and this makes that the introduction section lacks from a fully description of main concepts and contributions.

 

3. For the related work section I suggest authors to add a table (as a summary) denoting main aspects researched by each work (that are interesting for this work) and open issues that will be investigated here. The propose here must be highlighted with respect to others in the literature. For example the sentence ”The estimated VOR values vary largely from one study to another and the comparison of VOR deserves the further research” which is this “further research”? Why? How does this proposal solve this problem?

Again, I think that my previous comment is not fully addressed:

“I think that a related work section must be separated from the introduction section, adding also advantages and disadvantages of each related work with respect to the propose here. Improvements in the new method must be fully described. This is important because when the reader arrives to line 134 “With consideration of the limitations of the above methods” it is not clear which limitations are mentioned. “

 

4. section 6 must contain a better introduction about what authors are trying to show. Why do authors propose to change that coefficients/variables and no others? What did happen with the related works? That is, why have these variations been proposed? Which improvements have been proposed with respect to the related works?

 

Authors said:

“We applied three methods in the highway network of Jiangsu province.” which are these three methods? They are not clearly described… Did you explain them in section 5? or Will they describe in section 6?

Author Response

Thank you for the useful comments. the detailed reply is listed in the attached file.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

The authors are suggested to list the contributions of this study in Section Introduction.

Author Response

Thank you for the useful comments. The detailed reply  was listed in the attached file.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 3

Reviewer 2 Report

This new version has  improved the manuscript and I think it is suitable for publication.